At the invitation of Sherry Yuan at Sandwich Parenting, I will be writing a semi-regular blog about the weird world of Third Culture Kids. This introduction will be the longest—I promise!
If you have ever been associated with an international school, you have no doubt heard the term TCK, or Third Culture Kid. It is a term of great emotional appeal to those who claim it, because it explains rather neatly why people like me—people who grew up between different cultures—feel like such oddballs in later life.
As a quick primer, the TCK, as defined by Dr Ruth Useem, Dr David Pollock, Dr Ruth Van Reken and others, is a child of international mobility, following parents into another society or culture, and living for a period of time in a culture different than the family’s so-called home culture. Think an American diplomat’s daughter living in Beijing, or a Korean businessman’s son transplanted to Jakarta. What “third culture” implies is that these children do not end up fully belonging to either home or host culture but relate to a different hybridized culture, a third culture, that lies in between yet is set apart from both home and host.
The conventional TCK literature is fairly unanimous in stating that TCKs, despite their many globalized gifts, can be pretty emotionally lost in space as adults until their orbit bangs them into other people who have shared the same third culture experience. They will say an Italian who spent young years in Nigeria will have more in common with a Canadian growing up in Hong Kong than with people of their passport countries, or with Nigerians and Chinese in general. Their emotional home will be this third culture, and that culture is based on the shared experiences (some wonderful, some painful) of living in between.
Today, International Schools live and breathe the third culture ethos. They see themselves as in the business of fostering healthy internationalized third culture kids, who will one day grow into responsible third culture adults: that is, global citizens who can relate to people of other cultures, who can speak many languages, and who can spend their lives making peaceable bridges over a world of raging rivers. It is a wonderful concept, replete with coping tools, and very helpful to many, including me.
But is it perfect? Not quite.
First, the good. If you are an expat living abroad and are wondering about the impact your migratory choices are having on your kids, the TCK literature is a helpful template to explore. You will read that your TCK will go to school with kids from many cultures and be comfortable with those cultures; they will have linguistic skills, make friends easily, and possess expansive worldviews. You will hear from grown TCKs they can live and thrive anywhere in the world, and that international organizations love to hire them up. You will say awesome, and high five your wife. But the literature will also helpfully prepare you for the dark side: for the dislocation, the emotional homelessness, the occasional depression, and the long periods of restlessness that very often settle alongside the good. That is helpful to know, and TCK communities these days are generous in helping each other avoid the landmines.
If you self-identify as a TCK, as I do, and have gone through long periods of restlessness and depression, there is tremendous comfort in knowing why you might feel that way; and comfort in knowing many others have shared the same experience. There is commiseration and comradery. And most importantly, there is a notional home to belong to when in actual life you feel you don’t belong anywhere. Where are you from? I am a TCK.
But, of course, those feelings don’t belong exclusively to TCKs. Immigrants, refugees, and other people of migration also have intercultural dissonance, yet somehow those folks are not identified as TCKs. And that leads me to some of the bad. The TCK experience, as popularly defined, tends to apply to a unique group of people: expats. And expats are generally a privileged group, have options (oh, where should I live next?), and live in environments where the cultural capital is Western-leaning. TCK literature tends to capture the more or less Euro-American experience of growing up as an expat, and many other people of international mobility, say the Sindhis of Hong Kong, often do not identify. The key criticism here is that developed world expats, who are sponsored, have options, and many good options: they can stay, move on, or go home; they can engage or not engage. And this cultural loftiness can mean a very non-committal, even lackadaisical relationship to the host culture. Migrants on the other hand, even well-to-do ones, may not have the return option, and therefore are forced to engage more deeply with the host culture. In other words, the “third culture” can be seen as living in a bit of a rich kid’s travel bubble.
If you take this further, you get to where some ugly might be. There are some sociologists and educators who accuse international schools of being neo-colonial institutions, where “international” means Anglophone Westernism, and TCKs may as well be Theoretically-speaking, Colonial Kids. At said international schools, Euro-American kids tend to hold the most cultural capital, non-Euro-American kids hold less, and local students, even if from wealthy and elite families, can very often be way on the outside, despite physically residing in their home culture. Suffice it to say, these critics are not terribly sympathetic to TCKs and their travails, as they say identifying with a “third” culture comes mostly from a lack of interest in the host culture, and a sense of superiority over the home culture. Ouch, man—back off!
My kids are the fourth generation of Americans to grow up outside of America. And as a whole, my family fits pretty neatly into the TCK mold. We are international, multi-lingual, and motivated to bridge-build; we are exceedingly restless, move a lot, and have a hard time talking about “home”. Oh, and I watch Out of Africa with way too much wistful nostalgia. Boy, those were the days!
The TCK idea is a helpful construct that helps many people understand the effects of today’s growing nomadism. It is not a complete or perfect construct, and we have to be careful not to apply it to all international experiences willy-nilly. Thankfully it is an evolving construct, quickly catching up with the new realities of our international communities.
And for those of us who claim to be TCKs, we have to acknowledge the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are kind of an elite group, our international bubbles can look a little colonial, and we need to work harder to stretch our third interstitial culture into more elastic and gluey stuff, so that it adheres more meaningfully to both host and home cultures, shrink-wrapping the three together into a more cohesive whole. (Whew, I exhausted that metaphor.)
Anyway, that’s what this series of articles will be about: TCKs: embracing the good, addressing the bad, shrink-wrapping the ugly. Thanks for the platform, Sherry.